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In short, I'd been trying to figure out which type of drive I had in my 360 Elite, since I had been basically working up the nerve to go flash it, especially now that there are supposedly stealth firmwares, so that I can still enjoy my legit XBL Gold subscription (at least, provided I don't do something stupid like play MW2 before it's supposed to be out in stores).

Looking online, I found this link, which talks about the three primary drives.

Well, mine has the smooth tray like the BenQ shown, but what's difference is that in Hole #3 that they're talking about, mine has a yellow wire instead of a white wire. Could this mean that mine is using a different, fourth disc drive that isn't documented on here? Or is it simply a BenQ with a different color wire meant to throw potential modders off their game?

Bad from a modding standpoint. As far as I know, Lite-On drives are not moddable. The only option is to use a special tool to extract your drives unique key, swap the drive out with anouther 360 drive that is moddable, and then inject your key into the new drive so the 360 will recognize it. This is called spoofing the drive. It is possible, but very complicated and time consuming. Something I would definitely leave to a professional.

That looks like what you need. however you still need the extra bits of hardware like the sata adapter and the key probe in order to do it. Search on craigslist to see if you can find someone in your area that does mods. I found a guy on there that flashes 360's for 30 bucks locally. It would have cost me twice as much just to buy the hardware I needed to do it myself. Not to mention that he had already done like 200 units and guaranteed his work. If that doesn't work, there's always professional mod shops online. Good luck.

yeah that's right i mod all the drives all the time for friends and people but it's funny that
the latest liteon from microsoft 8385c you do not need the spear or ck3 probe but yet the
older one you still need the spear or probe strange... but on the other hand they are both
quieter and dont mess up as easy as the samsung or hitachi's good luck man.....

Okay, from looking through that list, it seems that the batch of 360's that came from the same team as mine, and manufactured around the same time span, were among those that got the last BenQ drives, but just started putting in Lite-On drives. Not sure how to tell if this is going to be easy or hard from that.

I also see that there's this Jungleflasher software that will let me flash the 360's drive even if I don't have that VIA chipset (thank god, because my experiences with VIA could write a book on how NOT to make hardware). But I just want to make sure that I'm not missing anything else to make this happen. Is there any special caveat that I should be aware of?

Okay, from looking through that list, it seems that the batch of 360's that came from the same team as mine, and manufactured around the same time span, were among those that got the last BenQ drives, but just started putting in Lite-On drives. Not sure how to tell if this is going to be easy or hard from that.

I also see that there's this Jungleflasher software that will let me flash the 360's drive even if I don't have that VIA chipset (thank god, because my experiences with VIA could write a book on how NOT to make hardware). But I just want to make sure that I'm not missing anything else to make this happen. Is there any special caveat that I should be aware of?

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To figure out if it's a Benq or a Lite On, you can take the face plate off and look inside to see if you see a yellow wire. It it's yellow then it's a Lite On.

If it's a Lite On then you'd have to open it up to see if it's a 78350c or the 83850c (you're opening it up no matter what so this isn't an issue). The 83850c is easier to mod, no addition hardware required beyond a SATA cable and a computer that has SATA connections.

The 78350c ones need additional hardware that can run from $20-$80 depending on what you get. The simplest is just a probe to get the key.